By Robert Arnason
Journal Staff
If you don't know what oil shale is, you're not alone.
To prepare this story I had to make approximately 50 phone calls and when I used the term "oil shale", the response on the other end of the line was often a few seconds of puzzled silence.
Oil shale, or shale oil (the terms are interchanged), is a rock that contains a sludgy organic material called kerogen, which can be heated and converted to an oil-like liquid.
The world is rich in oil shale and Walter Youngquist, a consulting geologist in Oregon, stated in a report to the World Energy Council; "If the containing organic material (in oil shale) could be converted to oil, the quantities would be far beyond all known conventional oil reserves (in the world)."
A portion of the world's massive reserves of oil shale is in our backyard. Exploration companies in Canada believe 7.8 billion barrels of oil is trapped in the shale of the Pasquia Hills. In other words, Northeast Saskatchewan may be sitting on a liquid gold mine.
There is, however, one small problem. Extracting the oil is expensive.
"It's not considered economic. Even at these prices (for oil)," said Ed Danscok, director of the Geology & Lands branch for Saskatchewan Industry and Resources.
Danscok was kind enough to share the history of oil shale exploration in the Pasquia Hills.
"The oil shales were first explored in the early 60s," said Danscok. "Sun Oil (which later became Suncor) was exploring in Pasquia."
After drilling holes for several years, they were disappointed by the concentration of oil in the rock.
"Eight and a half gallons per tonne of rock," said Danscok. "They left it (Pasquia) to go to Alberta, where they are more geologically blessed."
After 40 years of no activity in the Pasquia Hills, the shale oil in Eastern Saskatchewan has suddenly become sexy again - thanks to the doubling of oil prices in the last few years.
Danscok explained three companies have staked out exploration permits in a vast area; east-west from the Manitoba border to Arborfield and north-south from Carrot River to Hudson Bay.
CanWest Petroleum Corporation, one of the companies with permits, said in a statement in January, 2005 that they have drilled 44 test holes on their property in Pasquia Hills and they have 2.4 billion barrels of oil for a potential mine. They are currently conducting a study to determine if a mine and oil shale processing is economically feasible.
Calls from the Journal to CanWest, inquiring about the progress of the feasibility study, were not returned.
On their web site, CanWest states the oil shale in their deposit has "unusually high content of aromatics.' Meaning the oil could be used to make plastic.
The oil may be rich in aromatics, but Danscok is still not convinced.
"We're watching what they're doing," he said. But added, "It's still an unproven technology (to process). You're cooking the rocks. That's what you're doing."
Danscok is referring to the process of heating the rock to 500 degrees Celsius, in order to extract the oil. With natural gas at $12 per gigaJoule, cooking rocks would not be cheap.
"There's high input costs to this," said Danscok, who had "No idea," of the cost per barrel to process oil shale.
Aside from the high costs, oil shale also faces strong opposition from environmental groups. Greenpeace campaigned for several years against an oil shale processing plant in Australia, stating it required far too much energy to extract the oil and the waste from the process is toxic.
Greenpeace protests, in part, led to the shut down of the plant in the summer of 2004.
Faced with high processing costs and environmental concerns, Youngquist, the geologist from Oregon, reports that, "Perhaps one day, oil shale will eventually find a place in the world economy, but the energy demands of blasting, transport, crushing, heating... are large. So far shale oil remains the 'elusive energy'."